Ms Marie Donnelly:

We have, of course, met with the Minister on a number of occasions. The council has not actually issued a statement so in this context, I am speaking from my own perspective. I understand the rationale and logic of saying we should have LNG storage because at the moment we receive all of our gas from the twin pipes coming from Moffat in Scotland. In the event these pipes were damaged, either by accident or design, we would have no gas. Currently, we have no capacity to store gas on the island. Given the importance of gas in our economy today, that would have devastating consequences for houses which rely on gas for heating, for example, and on industry that relies on gas for industrial processes. The economic impact of a disruption to our gas supply would be very severe. We have to acknowledge that and accept that this is the case today. The key issue is that depending on the timing of the roll-out of such a decision and also the speed at which we reduce the use of fossil fuels, it may well be that the necessity of storage will reduce over time if we deliver on our proposal of phasing out fossil fuels and instead use renewable gas that we can produce, for example, through anaerobic digestion, here in the country as the backup and support to our sustainable electricity system. It is a question of timing. We have about 15 years to phase out fossil fuels. If we did it in five years, clearly we would not need an LNG terminal. If we do not do it in 15 years, we possibly would need it and therefore, as I understand it, the decision of the Government was taken on that basis.